The German-American pharmacologist and physiologist Otto Loewi (1873-1961) shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discoveries relating to the chemical transmission of nerve impulses.

Otto Loewi, the son of Jacob Loewi, a wine merchant, was born in Frankfurt am Main on June 3, 1873. In 1891 he became a medical student at the University of Strasbourg. He studied also philosophy and the history of art, both at Strasbourg and at the University of Munich (1893-1894). On his return to Strasbourg he devoted himself to medical studies, and he graduated as a doctor of medicine in 1896. While he was an assistant physician at the City Hospital, Frankfurt, he became disheartened by the ineffectiveness of medical treatments in certain common diseases, and he therefore decided to give up clinical work and become a medial scientist.

In 1898 Loewi was appointed an assistant in Hans Horst Meyer's department of pharmacology in the...